Education - Leadership Theories, Styles and Attributes & 3D Modelling and Printing

Week 6 - Leadership Theories, Styles and Attributes & 3D Modelling and Printing

This week the first homework task was to check out the video 'Leadership Theories and Styles', then identify a change initiative that I have been involved with. Apparently early on prior to the 50s leadership theories used to be focused on the person, then beyond the 50s it was more role focused and from the 70s onwards it has been more about the processes. The 7 leadership theories covered in the video were:

• Transactional - exchanges between leader and followers
• Transformational - engaged with motives and empowers followers, pays attention to professional development needs etc.
• Pedagogical - NZ typical approaches to school leaderships, academic missions and promotes professional development
• Distributed - shared and collective interactions and the situations define the leadership style
• Servant/Agile - Sharing awareness, listening and empathising. Lots of styles involved. Unleashing talent of others.
• Tū Rangatira - Common NZ approach in Te Kura schools, about innovation and vision. Leaders have a number of roles and a range of styles, and management different to leadership.
• Situational - old theory, leader adapts to the maturity of the followers, direct if low maturity and then move more towards supporting and coaching.

One particular change initiative didn’t really spring to mind and I was not really too sure about some of the differences as the video only gave a very brief description of each so I was hoping the in class time helps with understanding these and I'd get some more ideas about how to apply this to my current school situation.

So I moved on to the next task which was to use a tutorial video to make a bag clip using Tinkercad and using a mouse did make it a bit easier to navigate. I had a go and did manage to make the bag clip as you can see. There were some great tips on the video about how to do this. Basically you used a bunch of different 3D shapes and joined them together with a few techniques to get the final outcome that could be 3D printed.



I was quite proud of my efforts and ready for class!

Week 6 - LEADERSHIP Theories, Styles and Attributes.

We started with a class challenge where a random picture would be displayed for 15 seconds and each person took one of the 15 seconds and would talk about how this related to leadership theories. Pechaflickr was used to display the images, you just put in the keyword like ‘leadership’ and the images appeared. It was pretty funny and challenging with everyone participating and coming up with something on the spot.

We then moved on to work in groups and were asked to pick one leadership theory. We chose to take a look at Situational Leadership. Basically this kind of effective leadership involves a logical understanding of the situation and an appropriate response, rather than a charismatic leader with a large group of dedicated followers (Graeff, 1997).

We then all took a quiz to check our style of leadership. So my results came back as the following:

• Authoritarian 30
• Procedural 35
• Transformational 37
• Participative 39
• Laissez-Faire (Serviant) 37

I found it interesting that the weightings for me were pretty even, but maybe more of a leaning towards Participative, Transformational and Liassez-Faire type of leadership. So we then had a look at the chart about the different styles that were summarised and it was interesting to look at the types of control involved. Basically the ones most like my style had medium to low amount of control required. This makes sense as I like to involve others, participate, consult, reason and be helpful rather than control or tell people what to do. However, as a parent and teacher at times like when it comes to safety or resource management etc I will direct in an attempt to control the situation. Although, I’m also a fan of letting things run it's course and natural consequences and also sharing the reasoning behind any directives given. So in the end this website gave a good summary of these kinds of leadership and a great place to start reflecting on personal leadership and followership.

We also had a quick look at a video about EQ and Goleman’s styles and attributes of leadership. Emotional skills were considered to be two times more important than technical skills. The five areas that make up emotional intelligence are:

• Self awareness
• Self regulation
• Motivation
• Empathy
• Social skills

In groups we were challenged to make an image that focused on one of these areas and we picked ‘motivation’. We used the piclab app on a phone to make this great image made up of pictures we took and text we added.



It was also interesting to find out that Google also freely share their New Manager Training Guide, which includes some important aspects of emotional intelligence and a growth mindset that social skills can be taught etc. Also a great video about empathy and sympathy worth checking out from Dr Brené Brown. A great message about sympathy vs empathy. Having sympathy means you look into a situation, and empathy is a vulnerable choice to connect and sit with people rather than trying to fix it. I really like this analogy.

Week 6 DIGITAL - 3D Modelling and Printing

We then moved on to looking at aspects of 3D modelling and printing. We talked about issues like not having the resources like the printers and the time it takes to print things which can be difficult to manage in the classroom. The facilitator pointed out that she had outsourced some printing like earrings she had designed. I had not really thought about this as an option but I guess this is worth looking into further. Maybe we can send off our models to get printed somewhere else rather than purchase and maintain printers ourselves - a great idea!

We then had a go with SculptGL we started with a sphere of clay and started to make an animal then we all swapped seats and worked on someone else's and this how mine ended up looking. It was a simple idea to swap seats but very powerful. I felt pressure to try hard to make it work on someone else's sculpture and it was great to let go of control and see what others were able to come up with.



We then went back to Tinkercad and had a go at creating a Christmas decoration which was fun and frustrating at the same time. These tools were a great way to develop our spatial skills, creativity, and measurement to name a few. There is also research that states “strong spatial thinking, a skill necessary for creating three dimensional objects, is directly linked to success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics...spatial thinking can be taught and improved through practice.” (Karon, 2015). 

This is the last class as we head into to a break for Christmas and I'm really looking forward to unplugging, getting off the grid, and going camping with my family. My next blog will be in the new year so please take care, have fun, merry Christmas and all that jazz, I'll catch you on the flip side!

References

Graeff, C. L. (1997). Evolution of situational leadership theory: A critical review. The Leadership Quarterly, 8 (2), 153 - 170. doi:10.1016/S1048 - 9843(97)90014 - X

Karon, P. (2015). Teaching 3D Modeling to Children. CG Cookie. Retrieved from https://cgcookie.com/2015/05/29/teaching-3d-modeling-children/

Education - Growth Mindset and Computational Thinking

Week 5 - Developing a Growth Mindset and Computational Thinking

For homework this week we were asked to take a quiz about our mindset. I’ve come across Carol Dweck’s ideas about ‘Growth Mindset’ before and how much this kind of outlook and related beliefs can help us as learners. So I wondered how I might score at this point in my life? Well, turns out I’ve taken on board a lot or already had quite a growth mindset as I came out with 0 fixed and 8 growth.

However, I think that often despite logically believing these ideas, at times I don’t always naturally have this view of myself or others. I have habits of negative self talk like ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I’m not good enough’ when things get tough. But I guess, the first step is being aware of this and then taking action to not ‘get sucked in’ and limited by this initial reaction. I also have often thought about this from a learner point of view and not really from a leadership point of view. If anything basically can be ‘learnt’ why do we sometimes get so fixated on particular people or personality traits making good leaders, which is a very 'fixed' outlook. Surely these skills can be learnt with the right supports and motivations in place?

Another task was to try out a citation app and I had a go at https://www.mendeley.com which is cloud based so I thought it would be quite flexible and seems to be going OK so far as I’ve managed to add references into the library without too much fuss and also use them.

The last item of homework was to watch a youtube clip entitled The Poetry of Programming. Linda Liukas has some great ideas and developed an awesome book called Hello Ruby which helps kids develop programming skills through story telling. It is very encouraging for girls to get into coding and breaks the stereotypes of coding not just being for nerdy boys. I love her ideas about disruption starting with a vision and that code is the next universal language.

I myself have been breaking stereotypes ever since I left school by working in the male dominated IT industry and not working with many other women. I then did the opposite when I started work as a teacher in all girls schools up until my current job I have now. My entire digital classes used to be full of girls, and now every time I get a new class list for the digital classes one of the first things I do is look down the list and count the girls. Sadly each time the number of boys always majorly out numbers the girls. So still the stereotypes exists, and I will continue to make it my mission to make coding and computer science fun and engaging for all students and I will continue to challenge beliefs and ideas around fixed mindsets.

DIGITAL - Computational Thinking

So I arrived at class excited about the weeks topics as these are right up my alley. I’ve been following the development of the new Digital Technologies curriculum which is currently in draft and will be available for use next year. You should totally check it out if you are not familiar with it. It is a great step in the right direction for key technology development skills such as computational thinking to be taught to children as soon as they arrive at school rather than later on. It makes sense for kids to be exposed to these ideas early on in life, to be creators rather than consumers. However, resourcing and up skilling of teachers etc will be a mission for most schools and is a whole other issue.

We started class this week by pairing up and doing a ‘guess the number between 1 and 100’ game by asking each other questions. It is basically common sense to ask questions like is it less than or greater than etc to narrow down the number. This can then be easily programmed so a computer can play the game and can be made even more effective by changing the strategy slightly which essentially is computational thinking and algorithms in use. Someone in class mentioned that maybe it’s just the fact that the technical terms put people off a bit. Basically algorithms and computational thinking is about problem solving but the terms can freak people out. I have found students have come across algorithms in math classes but basically a knitting pattern, a recipe or instructions to fold a paper plane are all algorithms and we all use computational thinking but just don’t realise it. I watched a really great documentary a while back, you should check it out too it's all about algorithms if you are interested it was called The Secret Rules of Modern Living - Algorithms.

We then were given the challenge of writing some instructions to program a person like a robot to move around the room without bumping into things. Since both of us had coding backgrounds we wrote some initial instructions that looked quite ‘codey’ with while loops, conditions and degrees etc. Then reflecting on this we thought we should rewrite the instructions so they would make sense to anyone as someone else in the class was going to carry them out. So here are our two versions of instructions below. Other groups made quite lengthy accounts which were a lot like a treasure hunt, so many steps left/forward etc. In comparison we just went to a slightly different version which which could be argued was a little more efficient with less instructions needed due to a loop and conditional check. Algorithm efficiency is a whole other lesson in itself. So I guess this was our experience of coding kicking in which helped or hindered initially as we were programming humans not computers. But either way we all found a solution to the challenge in our own ways and all learnt something along the journey.

Another great video about getting started with coding and is inspiring is from Mitch Resnick.

LEADERSHIP - Growth Mindset

We had a look at the backwards bike video, where a man learnt how to ride a bike where the handlebars worked in the opposite directions. Even though we might know this is the case our brain can’t adjust and doesn’t understand how to ride the bike initially. This in some ways proves that knowing things doesn’t necessarily mean we understand things. It’s hard to change rigid entrenched thinking. If we apply it to understanding a growth mindset we might logically understand this but how do we put it into action to demonstrate our understanding? It is not always that simple.

There were some statistics given Diehl, E. (2013) about managers that had a fixed or a growth mindset. Basically there might have been short term gains with managers that had fixed mindsets but that long term the organisations had greater success with a manager that had a growth mindset.

Diehl, E. (2013) also found that growth-minded leadership involves:

- Validating and addressing staff fears and barriers
- Communicating the vision explicitly
- Providing support to those who lack knowledge or skills
- Creating opportunities to share research and information
- Allowing everyone access to growth opportunities
- Sharing the workload among all staff

Basically we should be concerned with our own personal growth and how we can support others to do the same, which in turn then lifts the whole organisation.

We were challenged to work in groups to create a stop motion to bust a myth related to a ‘fixed’ mindset. We discussed the idea of the tortoise and the hare race story which originally was about the hare being cocky and thinking it would easily beat a tortoise but he fell asleep and the tortoise won by being slow and steady. We did a version where the tortoise had a ‘growth’ mindset and trained and lifted weights etc then when it came to race day the tortoise beat the hare, so changing the narrative. The moral this time being that with a growth mindset, hard work and effort we can achieve great things. We had fun making this stop motion video, which somehow ended up with some interesting shots from on top of a table.

Another great session at Mindlab!

References
Diehl, E. (2013). Leading Change with a Growth Mindset. Community.mindsetworks.com. Retrieved from http://community.mindsetworks.com/blog-page/home-blogs/entry/leading-change-with-a-growth-mindset

Education - Research informed Leadership & Learning Theories

Week 4 - Research Informed Leadership & Learning Theories

So to be completely honest I didn’t do the prior readings and video watching that I should have done before the week 4 class. I don't even have a very good excuse, just that it’s been really hectic with a lot going on at the moment at work and with our family being the end of the school year. So I basically did the class and then after class caught up on the reading and video that I should have done prior to class, oh well I got there in the end.

LEADERSHIP - Research Informed Leadership
We had a quick discussion about the reading from Benseman, J. (2013) - Research-Informed Teaching of Adults: A Worthy Alternative to Old Habits and Hearsay? Now that I’ve gone back and actually read this I’ve come up with this summary of some key points:

• Research found a gap in teachers philosophies and their practices like student-centered vs teacher-centered, what they believed and what they did was often quite different.
• We tend to default to teaching as we have been taught much like our parenting I guess.
• Teachers tend to rely on experience vs research findings
• We could use research based on effective teaching but who decides what effective looks like and what is the criteria?
• We could use learners evaluation of learning success and experiences but this has limits, learning might occur and be uncomfortable and in turn skewing ratings
• We could use peer teachers who are perceived to be effective by peers, but might not match relevant research and again who decides who is an effective peer teacher and how?
• We could use research-informed teaching/practice based on trials and quantitative and qualitative information. But what about quality of this? For example debate about learning styles - some research argues it is good to utilise learners strengths and preferences however, other research argues that it is not helpful due to labelling and a fixed mindset and what about the value of developing the weaker learning styles etc. 

So I think in the end the article acknowledged that teaching is complex, there are so many varying factors and maybe it’s more like an art and a science put together or craft we are refining. We can’t always scientifically nail down the factors of success teaching practice and a certain amount of x-factor that can't be qualified or quantified. Using research informed practices is however most likely to be a step in the right direction.

This made me think about things I’ve come to personally believe (my confirmation bias lol) that teaching is much like parenting, everyone is entitled to their personal opinion about what action or strategy they would use for a particular situation which may be research based or based on experience. Also that we can’t always predict how it will pan out for that particular situation and we don’t know if it was effective until after we have tried it. However, what’s probably most important is that we can reflect on what the outcome appears to be for that child and it if helped or hindered them. However, so much is debatable and there are so many variables and maybe a completely different strategy might have had the same effect. Also from a teaching context rather than our own beliefs guiding our actions as teachers, as professionals we must take action from the basis of the values, beliefs, vision and policies that the school has put in place. Luckily for me these school policies and beliefs usually fit really well with my own personal beliefs.

Is it more about the way in which we are reflective in taking action to try to improve the lives of our children that is most important? In a school environment we together as teachers, learners and the community whanau must decide what we think is best for the learners. Therefore maybe it is best to spend time truly trying to understand the impact we are having in order to make changes if needed. So anyway I think I’m blahing on too much and heading off track and will come back to the idea of how we might use research to inform our practice.

This lead onto to us watching a really old video based on Dr Foxes Lecture Experiment where a person was giving a lecture about some scientific research however, the content was completely made up and he was actually an actor who learnt the speech a few days before as discussed by Naftulin, D.H., Ware Jr, J.E. & Donnelly, F.A. (1973). They wanted to see if people would believe him and if they could pull it off. They found that in fact people did believe him and it was very convincing. By using particular language techniques like double talk etc he was able to pull it off.

So this leads to some questions about ourselves as educators and about validity of research and what is relevant knowledge? How might we be mislead at times? I often wonder about research in that just about anything can be justified if you conduct research in a particular way looking to confirm suspicions or ideas. How can we know that research is conducted in an ethical and unbiased manner and takes in all relevant variables - I think these aspects can always be debated. I think much like infomercials with dodgy phrases and statistics and claims we must be critical thinkers in whatever we do. There are always competing agendas at play and each person or group involved might be inclined to lean towards confirmation bias, it is a natural response to claims. We compare these claims to our own current beliefs and we tend to want to confirm and strengthen our current beliefs at the cost of being more open minded and open to multiple perspectives and broader thinking.

Again I think the success or usefulness of research comes back to how we use it and the impact of the action taken because of the research. We are running our own trials and research each day in class, we take action and try things out for ourselves in our particular situations as teachers so we can then make a call about its effectiveness. We discuss with others including the learners and co-teachers and other teachers gaining multiple perspectives about how things went, how it might have been helpful or not and work on the next steps together. It is not always easy to acknowledge all the competing ideas, outcomes, agendas and beliefs and perspectives. This is what I’ve found both awesome and challenging in our school environment. It is so awesome to be able to discuss situations with co-teachers and people from varying backgrounds who are right there with you in the thick of it.

I’m in a hapu made up of six advisory teachers and each of their 20ish students so all 100 plus people sharing a learning space together. This is a big group to deal with and the sense of community and whanau is awesome. Working as six co-teachers with one as a hapu leader and sharing an office can also be very challenging as you could imagine. However, I’m lucky in that the teachers in our hapu group are a great bunch of individuals and what holds us together is that we are all supportive, have a great sense of humour, enjoy a robust debate and care deeply about the learners and the teachers. This kind of teaching and learning structure supports us and encourages us to effectively co-teach and refine our practice. We are often reflecting on our practices with robust and effective discussions that happen in real time and we are all truely interdependent in our roles.

I have not been involved in this kind of teaching environment before, everything is so transparent, shared, relevant and immediate which is awesome from an informed teacher practice point of view when things are going well with the teams. On the flip side I also find this quite draining as everything is so open and vast, there is so much contact with people and we only really have glass separations between different areas or rooms.  I do find it hard at times to have a quiet private moment to think and reflect so I must try to balance this out in my broader life outside of school. Ultimately I am a sensitive introvert that needs some quiet time to myself to process life and experiences. There are also many learners in our classes who also feel the same way in this fast paced shared environment so we as a hapu have tried to find ways to unplug and relax with meditation and mindfulness as part of our classes which has been much appreciated by all.

I'm surprised at how much I've actually enjoyed this process of writing this blog. I don't think it really matters about who reads it (bit long and boring really and could be more of a personal 'you had to be there' thing). However, that said I think for me the benefit has been that it is a great way for me to organise my thoughts and I can come back to them when needed.  So anyway if you are still reading this, I know it has been pretty long winded, you’ll probably be happy that I’ll now move on to the Digital part of the class.

DIGITAL - Collaborative, Constructionist and Constructivist Learning

With the more boring stuff out of the way we moved on to a fun practical challenge. We worked in groups to make a digital musical instrument using Makey Makey’s. These are basically electronic kits that you can use to make nearly anything connect and interact with a computer. I have already been using these in my classes and have found that students love using them and they can be quite creative. 

I was in a team with another work colleague who has also used them before and was actually currently teaching a module that was basically the same context of making musical instruments. The other two members had not used them before. So my colleague and I sat back and let the other two take charge to gain the practical experience of working it out and just jumped in to help with problem solving when needed. We basically created a keyboard from felts wrapped in tinfoil and programmed them to play a note using Scratch. This is one of the most common programming environments used to teach computer coding and is really fun!

The two teachers new to the Makey Makeys did really well and enjoyed the experience. We were all very proud of our keyboard and it worked really well.

We then reflected on the task by checking out some learning philosophies such as constructionist and constructivist learning. I was pretty lost about the difference between these ideas at this point and wished I had actually watched the video prior to the class as instructed - doh. We had to work in our teams to reflect on the musical instrument activity and some of the aspects of collaboration, and constructionist and constructivist learning involved. So I bumbled through and did a quick bit of Googling and had some discussions with the others to help with creating a basic presentation. We then took a screencast of us delivering the presentation and we each took turns at reading a part of it. For being quite rushed I think we did a great job. 

Now that I’ve gone back to have another look into these learning theories I think the key message from the day was that there are a couple of particularly relevant ones when it comes to using digital technologies in the classroom which are constructionism and constructivism.

Constructionism is basically about learners constructing most of what they learn or understand and is process which might include using prior knowledge and using new knowledge to construct or transform knowledge. Constructivism is like a subset of constructionism where the learner actually ‘produces’ something as part of constructing knowledge like a robot or an instrument in this case. It is essentially ‘learning through doing’ which I guess is also the basis of the ‘maker’ culture that is gaining a come back. Who doesn’t like tinkering with stuff, that is what I loved about hanging out with my dad in the garage and all his interesting bits and pieces we used to make stuff. I love making things in my classes, I love tactile learning and have found these kinds of approaches are much appreciated by many students.

One last thing we were asked to do was to go back and check out the collaboration ITL rubrics to see if the instrument activity encouraged a high level of collaboration and I believe it meet all the criteria of the highest level 5. We all had shared responsibilities as some of us helped with coding and others made the instrument and we made big decisions together about the kind of instrument and how it would be coded. We needed each other to contribute and play a part in order to be successful in our learning so meet the highest level 5 of the ITL Collaboration criteria as follows:

• Students DO have shared responsibility 
• AND they DO make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work 
• AND their work is interdependent.

So I guess if we are to use research and learning theories to improve our teaching practices these theories and ideas are great places to start.

References

Benseman, J. (2013). Research-Informed Teaching of Adults: A Worthy Alternative to Old Habits and Hearsay?. Unitec ePress. Number 2. Retrieved from http://www.unitec.ac.nz/epress/index.php/research-informed-teaching-of-adults-a-worthy-alternative-to-old-habits-and-hearsay/

The Dr Fox Lecture experiment - (Naftulin, D.H., Ware Jr, J.E. & Donnelly, F.A. (1973). The Doctor Fox Lecture: a paradigm of educational seduction. Academic Medicine, 48(7), 630-5. Retrieved from http://pdfs.journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/1973/07000/The_Doctor_Fox_Lecture__a_paradigm_of_educational.3.pdf)

ITL Research. (2012). 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. Retrieved from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research

Education - Digital Disruption & Implementing Technology...

Week 3 Flipped Learning (Homework)

Okay so I’m back for blog post number three - yeehaa! It has been a really fun week, so for homework we started by assembling Google Cardboard headsets. Once you are done you place your phone into the headset and it turns into a low cost virtual reality headset. You can check it out at https://vr.google.com/cardboard/. We were also asked to install the following apps onto our mobile devices - Aurasma, Quiver, Expeditions and Google Translate. If we had an Android device, we also needed to download Anatomy 4D and Elements 4D. I have had a tinker with this cardboard VR before but but had not used many apps so was excited to have another look into the possibilities.

We also read an article ‘Conditions for classroom technology innovations’ and it included some interesting stories about digital innovations that teachers tried to implement and how successfully or not so successfully they were implemented. Basically they came up with 11 key factors grouped into 3 areas which had an impact on the success of the technology innovations. The three key areas included:

• The innovator (teacher) - their technological knowledge, how the tech fit with the teacher pedagogy, and knowledge of the school's social environment and organisational structure.
• The innovation (project) - how much of a shift the innovation was from the current school culture, teachers current practice and current resources.
• The context (school) - which included the technological infrastructure, human infrastructure (support staff, policies and processes etc) and the organisational culture.

I think in the end it was pretty much common sense (although a good friend of mine once said “well common sense is not so common actually”). Basically a strong teacher had the biggest impact on success, small incremental independent steps and quick wins worked well and social support was also needed.  I think that was the gist of the article in the end. So armed with my Google Cardboard I was ready for our classroom session (apart from the magnet button thing not working properly which totally bugged me).

Leadership - Implementing Technology Innovation - In Class Time

We launched straight into looking at two models that help teachers implement technological innovations in the classroom - SAMR and TPACK. Well, I was already familiar with SAMR but had not heard of TPACK before so this was great and I was keen to find out more about this.

SAMR was developed by Ruben Puentedura and includes 4 ways to integrate technology in your learning activities. You can check SAMR out on the TKI website. Mark Anderson has created a version of SAMR that shifts the focus slightly to teachers confidence. These tools help teachers to design learning tasks that significantly transform the learning experience.

TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) was developed by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler and identifies the knowledge teachers need to be able to teach effectively with technology. I would like to look into using TPACK so that I can compare this with SAMR, so it’s on my list of things to do (which to be fair is quite long). I would like to use this in an upcoming assignment so will see how that goes.
We then moved on to looking at Google Tour Builder which is super awesome. You can create virtual trips around the world using Google maps and add images, text and notes etc to each location. Our facilitator used this to share her whakapapa as a kind of Mihimihi/Pepeha which I thought was an awesome idea. I would really love to create something similar for myself personally and use as an introduction of myself to students at the beginning of new classes and encourage students to do the same.

We were then asked to form groups and create an activity that could be used to create an activity we could use with our students. I ended up in a group creating a resource with two other work colleagues from our Junior High School that we could use at the beginning of next year. Basically in teams students could map out a tour of all the school trips they were going on like their camp and other service days and whanau development trips etc. We could go nuts using drone footage, assign student roles within the teams like editor, photographer, tech leads, etc. The tours could then be shared with the school community and caregivers and could evolve in real time if students had access to the internet. This was an example of a tour we started. We got pretty excited about our ideas and we worked really well as a team.

Looking back we did not actually use SAMR or TPACK to plan and evaluate our learning task - doh missed the boat on that one. So after a quick think about in retrospect, I think we pretty much did manage to plan an in-depth rich learning task and used the tech effectively and it would probably be at the highest level of ‘Redefinition’. Basically we were able to redefine the idea of a journal or diary of a trip by linking to a virtual map and add multimedia which totally transforms this idea and allows options for students to engage with the idea and wouldn’t be possible without using something like Tour Builder (unless someone would like to disagree?). Turns out that for homework what we are going to do involves going back to the planned activities we shared and evaluate these using these tools so its all good.

We also had a quick discussion about the article we read for homework and basically discussed the ‘messiness’ of trying to implement tech. I myself have had some epic fails and some awesome wins with tech in the classroom and I guess I personally always fall back on preparing, being organised and testing things out as much as possible but at the same time being flexible and calm when things don’t go so well which can often be the case. I’m usually pretty upfront with the students and involve students, they often have great ideas and love working things out together. We basically keep calm and carry on with problem solving, have a laugh or even quite happily abandon ship if needed and try something else if things are not salvageable. It is all basically a learning process and messy much like many IT jobs I’ve had in the past. It’s hardly ever smooth sailing and I’m all for a bit of real world learning and sharing of mistakes, problems and solutions.

Digital - Technology Disruption and Mixed Reality - In Class Time





Image Attribution: Evan-Amos - Own work Public Domain

For this part of the class we had a really fun time exploring Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. We first had a go with Google Expeditions which was awesome! You can be the tour guide or the person taking a tour and you start the tour on your phone and then pop the phone into the cardboard headset and take a look around, you are immersed in the place as if you are actually there. We took a tour around the Great wall of China and trip under the sea, it was really fun!

We also had a go with Aurasma and created a cartoon drawing of ourselves and when you placed the phone over the image this triggered the information you wanted to pop up on the phone. We took a short vid of ourselves and when someone placed their phone over the drawn image the video would pop up on their phone. This was also super fun. I can imagine how students could use posters up on the wall around the school or handouts to find the hidden info. They could create these quickly and easily, I could see students very engaged in these kinds of missions.

Another awesome tool was Quiver, basically you start by printing out some colouring pages and colour them in. I had a volcano diagram and coloured it in. Then when you put the phone over this it would register the drawing and it would pop out in 3D with the colours you have drawn and you can inspect the volcano and show and hide different parts in 3D. It was very cool!

Something similar was Elements 4D and Anatomy 4D these were printed sheets and when you held the phone over the printed image a virtual image popped out in 3D and also moved so was 4D like a person’s real heart was pumping and could be inspected. You could turn it around and look at different parts zooming in and out - super rad!

So we definitely all had some serious fun and I felt really inspired after this session. The sessions always go so fast. For a late night after school on a weekday from 4pm to 8pm it has been awesome to to be so inspired and so totally worth the effort - if there were only more hours in a day to implement these great ideas.

References

Zhao, Y., Pugh, K., Sheldon, S. & Byers, J. (2002). Conditions for classroom technology innovations. Teachers College Record, 104(3), 482-515. Retrieved from https://www.rtsd.org/cms/lib/PA01000218/Centricity/Domain/96/Conditions%20for%20Classroom%20Tech.pdf

Education - Leadership, Competencies & 21st Century Skills

Week 2
I would like to start by saying thanks heaps to the people who were supportive of the first post, you guys totally rock! It really did spur me on in doing this next one so thanks heaps. I’m determined to keep this up so yay for blog post number two! As you might have read the first one you have probably noticed that I do dribble on a bit - I’m sorry about this. I’ll try to keep it a bit more succinct but I’m unsure if I’ll manage as it’s a bad habit of mine and worse when I’m nervous.

Anyway on with the job, so, for the ‘flipped learning’ task (basically homework in preparation for the next class) we were encouraged to read an article - "Towards Reconceptualising Leadership: The Implications of the Revised New Zealand Curriculum for School Leaders Case Study". By Wayne Freeth University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti University of Oulu, Finland.

It was pretty hardcore reading and did require a coffee break for me to finish it but from what I can gather it had a few interesting themes. I think (I’m still a tad unsure) that Wayne was basically looking into how school leaders are re-interpreting and implementing the 2007 curriculum. In particular he was interested in the links between the new understandings of knowledge and learning and how these ideas would flow over into changes required in leadership to reflect these new understandings. His more specific focus was on distributed leadership and how this links to knowledge as a noun vs verb.

If we first go back to the older more traditional understanding of learning as a noun and something we accumulate or soak up this kind of view is reflected in leadership that is autocratic, bureaucratic and hierarchical. Basically a leader holds the knowledge and skills that the follower is trying to gain, essentially leading from the top down. However, if we look at a more modern understanding of learning as a verb that people co-construct together, this view fits better with more distributed, democratic and transformational leadership styles. In this way one person does not own or hold the knowledge and this requires us all to be leaders and learners at the same time, this includes all teachers, management including the principal and the students. So is this more modern approach reflected in the structures of school leadership in our schools today?

These ideas kind of made logical sense at first, of course we should implement flatter structures to reflect this new understanding of learning etc but thinking about it a little deeper it does not appear to be such a simple idea in terms of how this might actually be implemented due to maybe the more practical aspects of people's roles, decision making processes, time and resources. Essentially an older view is so ingrained, we label ourselves and place ourselves into hierarchies all the time. In my last blog I bleated on about being a digital technologies teacher and elearning learning leader and avoiding the math subject as a secondary teacher despite being trained to teach this as a second subject area. These are very narrow hierarchical views. I was talking about silos and people being the gatekeepers of knowledge based on job titles and experiences etc.

However, if I really try to shift my outlook to learning as a verb and being about co-construction, I see my roles quite differently. Although I have specific job titles I actually facilitate learning that involves literacy, math and other specialist knowledge. These kinds of knowledge are such an integral part of creating any digital outcome. Anything we create in a digital way is about communicating a message or can be interpreted. Whether it is using language, numbers, symbols, images or sounds etc it still all communications (the C part of ICT) not simply digital technologies as my subject specialisation states. You can’t create a computer program without eventually running into logical math expressions or text or graphics etc.

In our school we the teachers and students are co-constructing new knowledge daily. Whenever we teach our integrated modules (two subjects with 2 teachers), we bring our knowledge as teachers and students together to create new understandings. For example in my current class this week I (as a digital technologies specialist) am working with a languages specialist and together the students are creating weather forecast videos in french. We including myself have all learnt something different because we all came with different prior knowledge and skills.

I am wondering are our job titles and leadership titles actually necessary? Do they just perpetuate an old and outdated view of knowledge, and gatekeepers of knowledge. In fact I used to sign off with my Job title as ‘Learning Leader - elearning ‘but a while back I dropped the elearning bit off and I think I even had Digital Technologies teacher on there before that which I removed prior to that even.

I’ve also been wondering - what if when I left school I just decided to study something different rather than take the IT pathway like science or art? Would I have been just as successful in my career? I actually think I would have been if I had put in the same amount of time and effort. But I guess out of practicalities we start to specialise at secondary schools and definitely when undertaking tertiary study and jobs. Is there a right time to specialise into areas, should we just do this later in life? I believe we can simply learn whatever we need to, whenever we want to if we have been able to develop the skills to know how to learn and are motivated to learn. Although I was an apathetic average teenager who didn’t like secondary school much, I am still very grateful for having learnt the basics of being able to communicate with text, language and numbers (which happened to be very seperate subjects at the time). I’m also very grateful that my parents valued education, despite leaving school early I was still expected to continue learning whether it would be at a job or at some other kind of formal education.

If we really took these new ideas of learning and teaching onboard and worked more collaboratively, how flat would we and could we make the leadership structures in our school without creating a fair bit of chaos. Is my view a little pessimistic, maybe this would be possible to do quite successfully? Are we all simply people first, who are both learning and leading at the same time it just depends on the situation? Should we just get rid of our titles, labels and curriculum silos and divisions altogether? We made the decision to call teachers by their first names at our school to remove some of the hierarchy and older views of knowledge being held by particular people and the power imbalance of knowledge as a noun. How far do we take this? What should we write onto a “Hello my name is….” sticker just our name and leave off the title that often follows this? How would we define ourselves as learners and teachers without labels? Does our job title define who we really are, what we really believe, our success and what we are trying to achieve in our schools? So back up the truck, I think I’m lost down some crazy rabbit hole now! Time to hit the reset button and get to some kind of point.

Ok, so, clearly I got a bit lost in the reading and I found it hard to keep up with all the ideas presented. My brain was overheating and that was just one of the many themes. In the end the article talks about multiple truths and I guess I totally concur with him on this one as I personally think one truth doesn’t really exist as everyone interprets situations in their own unique way and truth is simply someone's perception of an idea or situation so it is only true for that one person or others who agree and see it the same way. In a lot of ways we are all walking contradictions, we say we believe knowledge is a verb but busily label ourselves and others and conform to ideas of subject silos and hierarchies for many practical reasons.

So we live in a constant dichotomy of multiple truths and I guess it is much like a swinging pendulum depending on the specific situation we discuss. In school for example we can say we believe that knowing how to learn and the 4 c’s (communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking) for 21st century learners are the most important skills learners should develop and then in the same breath carry on busily writing our curriculum progression rubrics for our subject areas in our subject silos and plan our learning objectives based on our specialist silos of knowledge and make sure we are cover the appropriate parts of the curriculum and tracking the exact bits students have “learnt”. We can’t always be so idealist, we have national curriculum, directives we must confirm to and only so much time and resources. But maybe we can do more to move forward.

Our school has tried to put dispositions at the forefront of our ‘school curriculum’ with our CLOAK values (Challenge our mindsets, learning is connected, ourselves as learners, ako always, and kindness and respect) - but do we really keep them at the forefront of our learning or are these crowded out by our silos of curriculum and content knowledge and areas of compartmentalised leadership? Are these really 21st century or even current or future focused enough? Maybe they are good as a broad umbrella and the 21st century skills come out from underneath these?

I guess I’m left with more questions than answers on this one and am hoping the in-class time will help unpack this thinking. I’m pretty spent on thinking about all of this, my brain is officially fried.

In Class Week 2 - Leadership - Key Competencies in Leadership
So we discussed the above article in class and I had a light bulb moment - I thought the new ideas about knowledge were similar to the notions of the ‘fixed’ vs ‘growth’ mindset ideas of Carol Dweck. It is fair to say it is also a much more empowering and hopeful view about learning and knowledge.

We then moved on quickly to look at the Key Competencies and how do we role model these as leaders? How are these linked to our professional standards? We also had a discussion about how we assess and focus on the KCs. Many teachers said that we didn’t really explicitly teach and assess these but when comes to writing report comments and in our relationships with our students we do focus on these and can comment on these in this way. The key competencies from the NZ Curriculum:

• Thinking
• Using language, symbols & texts
• Managing self
• Relating to others
• Participating and contributing

When then looked at ITL (Innovate Teaching and Learning) research and 21st century skills rubrics.  Another colleague and I couldn't believe we had not come across this before, I was quite excited about this. I also cynically wondered what Microsoft might be trying to sell us, however, I was quite relieved as it appears to all be pretty useful and relevant stuff with no costs involved (so far). ITL came up with guidelines about how to practically integrate 21st century skills into the design of learning tasks and reflect on the impact of these teaching practices which boiled down to these aspects:

ITL 21st Century Skills

• Collaboration
• Knowledge construction
• Self-regulation
• Real-world problems / innovations
• ICT for learning
• Skilled Communication

If you compare them to the KCs they are pretty similar but the role of ICT & digital fluencies are not explicit in the KCs, although it could fall under using language, symbols and text.  Also where would computational thinking fit?

In Class Week 2 - Digital - 21st Century Skills
We moved on to look at the rubrics and flowcharts developed as part of the ITL research. We formed fairly random teams. I ended up with one work colleague and a couple of other people I hadn’t worked with yet. We made an awesome team it was a fun, energetic and a crazy time spent developing a video that we didn’t quite finish and upload on time (so can’t insert awesome but embarrassing video here yet). The course facilitator also used a very large on screen timer to keep us focused in the planning stage and then the construction phase. This timer idea was very simple and effective which I used the very next day in class and it totally helped the students with time management. I had used timers before on an individual basis but not as a whole class, this was a great simple tool.

We were given the first skill collaboration and these were the progress indicators we were trying to explain:

1. Firstly Students are NOT required to work together in pairs or groups. 
2. Students DO work together BUT they DO NOT have shared responsibility. 
3. Students DO have shared responsibility BUT they ARE NOT required to make substantive decisions together. 
4. Students DO have shared responsibility AND they DO make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work BUT their work is not interdependent. 
5. Students DO have shared responsibility AND they DO make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work AND their work is interdependent.

So in making the collaborative video about collaboration we pretty much walked the walk and talked the talk. Four of us had to work together and relied upon each other to make key decisions to come up with the final outcome, we had our ups and downs just our students do. I was quickly reminded of how similar we are to our students giggling, getting mixed up, reshooting, running out of battery on our device, being late in finishing, generally being eggs. We were just older versions of our students. So good to be reminded of what it is like to be a student. Had great conversations with the students about this and our learnings the next day when they were finishing their french weather forecast videos.

At our school we use Pam Hooks SOLO rubrics as progressions for depth of knowledge and the 5 progressions in the ITL resources do appear to align with the SOLO stages. I’m pretty sure our facilitator did talk about these being based on SOLO however, I can’t see this in the documentation anywhere and would like to look into this further. I think these are great practical simple rubrics and flow charts that could help us plan meaningful 21st century learning. I would love to explore how we could integrate and use these in our Digital Fluencies Advisory curriculum and other ways in 2018.

We also looked at how we could easily link the professional standards to our blogs using the ‘labels’ keywords on our blogs which I’m going to give a go.

We finished by brainstorming and discussing problems or challenges we have in our teacher practice. Our first assignment is to explore how innovation could be used to help solve one of these issues. So we were like ‘where do we start?’ I had a few ideas I’ll explore further and hopefully have some good chats with staff and students in the coming week to narrow down to one issue:

• How could I more effectively differentiate and scaffold learning for students?
• How could I more effectively help students to develop future focused dispositions/to develop our CLOAK values/use our learning process to enhance learning?
• How could I help the community gain a better understand our school vision and why and how this is implemented?
• How could I help students be more effective communicators and caring as a community?
• How could I helps students be more reflective in their learning and share their learning effectively with their family and wider community?
• How could I build a more inclusive school culture?
• How could I help students develop more effective student agency?
• How could I empower staff to feel passionate and confident in helping students to develop their digital fluencies?
• How could I empower staff to feel passionate and confident in developing their e-learning skills?
• How could digital fluencies be developed for students in all classes in a fun and sustainable manner?

So I will ponder these questions to narrow these down to one focus for my assignment in the upcoming weeks. Watch this space...please let me know if you also have some thoughts about this.




Sandra, and I 💗 learning with people.   Thanks for reading this and keep cool till after school, Ka kite anō …


References
(n.d.). Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society - NEA. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf

(2014, April 4). Key competencies / Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Key-competencies

(2015, September 30). ITL Research - Microsoft in Education. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research

(n.d.). SOLO Taxonomy — HookED - Pam Hook. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://pamhook.com/solo-taxonomy/

(n.d.). Julian Moore Interim Chief Executive - Education Council. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://educationcouncil.org.nz/sites/default/files/Introducing%20the%20Code%20and%20Standards.pdf

Education - Knowledge & Followership

Introduction

Well to cut a long story short, I'm not actually too sure about who might be interested in reading about my thoughts and why anyone might even be slightly interested. But, I figure, if I give you an idea of why I've started this blog and what I might be bleating on about you can then decide if you would like to read on, or you would rather close this and go check Facebook or do something else.

I'm currently a New Zealand secondary school teacher who in a past life didn't really enjoy secondary school so left a bit early and completed an IT degree. I then worked in the IT industry initially before training to become a teacher. So the journey is a little bit ironic in that I ended up becoming a teacher after busily trying to escape school.

However, I have always loved being creative and having fun with techy stuff so my specialist teaching area is digital technologies (apparently I'm also supposed to be able to teach math but have avoided this due to panic attacks about recalling times tables. Being a bad speller is bad enough as a teacher having to write on whiteboards without a spellcheck in my brain). Anyway, at this point I'm currently employed as a Learning Leader specialising in eLearning and am a foundation staff member at a new Junior High School. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly my job entails at this school as my job description has changed and evolved somewhat since I started.

It has been a crazy couple of years being part of starting a new school and during these past 2 years we started with about 600 students and have grown to about 1000 students. It would be a wee bit of an understatement to say that we have been a bit busy and it's a little mad but myself and four other work colleagues have started a postgraduate course in collaboration, elearning and leadership. The idea is that I'll put my thoughts and learning into a blog, this will serve as a way to organise my thoughts and reflect and share what I've learnt with anyone else who might be interested. I have always thought I should try this blogging business out and have started down this track in the past with some of my students but have not really ever carried on with them. I would really like to see this one through till the end of the course. I am interested to see how it might help me reflect and improve my teaching and leadership practice and how it might be received by others.

I am pretty petrified about publishing this and am pretty much pooping my pants (trying to be PC and a good role model about this but you can probably imagine what I'd actually like to say about this process). I was more of a sit at the back of the room doodling under the radar type of gal at school. Writing was not really my buzz I would have rather poked my eyes out with a stick than go to my English class and I failed miserably at writing essays for my History class. So, I'm sorry in advance about the quality of the writing and thank goodness for red squiggly underlines and right-clicks (actually I've had to retrain myself to do 2 finger taps now that I'm using an Apple). I have also learnt a lot from English teachers like the words a lot are two separate words not one and to not end student report sentences with "she is capable of" because you can't end sentences with a preposition whatever that actually means I'm still unsure so I just changed the sentence.  It's a great strategy I've used many times and so is procrastination. So speaking of which I'd better get cracking on with a reflection of the first session.

Basically for the first half of the course there are two separate themes running throughout each session. One is leadership and the other is digital collaboration.

Week 1 Digital Collaboration- What is Knowledge?

So we had discussions in groups and some of us discussed "what is knowledge" (ying) and other discussed "what is education" (yang). We used playdoh (yes we are adults and despite some initial reservations we actually enjoyed this) to represent these ideas. We then looked into some research around these ideas and refined them. Finally a ying group and a yang group came together to create a collaborative representation and videoed or photographed the final outcome.

We looked at the ideas that many of us are familiar with such as knowledge not being a noun, that it is more like a verb. It is not simply absorbed, we take action when learn and do stuff with knowledge. I also feel that the context of learning is social and that we develop some kind of shared understandings when we learn and that we all bring something to the experience and can learn from each other, similar to the māori concept of ako. I believe education is about acknowledging our part in the interdependence of ourselves with others. Ideally education should motivate and support people in becoming happy well adjusted members of society in our own country and in the wider connected world. But I guess the more complex issue involved is actually how exactly can do we do this successfully and in a sustainable manner in our schools today. I feel like this is what we as educators are often pondering and grappling with at times.

Week 1 Leadership - Followership

So we were then asked to reflect on what kind of follower we thought we were during the task of creating the video. Ideas from Kelley (1998) were presented:

• Sheep - passive and seek motivation and need their leader to do the thinking for them.

• Yes-people - positive and support the leader but still need their leader to do the thinking and they will ‘do’.

• Alienated - negative followers that think for themselves but pick holes in the leadership

• Survivors - sit on the fence and are passive, won’t be the first to jump on board with the leader but won’t be the last either. Maintain the status quo.

• Effective - think for themselves, positive engery, accept leadership and still have own opinions which they can still disagree with and offer alternatives and help when needed. 

I guess we would all like to think we are effective followers, but if I’m honest with myself at times I’ve probably had a turn in all the above categories in different situations in my life. During our little video challenge I did at times express my own ideas however, I was pretty awkward. I was also nervous as I didn’t really know most of the other people in the group so tended to hang back. Others confidently took the lead and were doing a great job in all aspects and the techy bits too. So I guess this is kind of my default which is, as long a team is heading in the right direction I’m happy to do what I can to help when needed, I guess I try to be a good follower by sitting back at times so others can take lead. But on the flip side maybe at times I could step up more often and allow others time to follow.

The other bit of homework was to reflect on what I consider a good leader to be like. So rather than particular dispositions springing to mind I thought about one of the best leaders I’ve even known in the school context and I would describe her as the following, based on how awesome she made me feel as a follower:

• A great communicator
• Down to earth
• Forthcoming about decisions and how they were made
• Inclusive of others
• Respectful of others
• Empathic and could see issues from all angles and points of view
• Resourceful
• Supportive

So these are all traits I guess I aspire to develop myself as a leader. I’m sure we will unpack these ideas more in the coming weeks and I’ve spent waaaaay too long sitting in this position, my back has totally seized up so I will leave it there and move on to some final coments.

Final Comments

So being a bit of a nerd I’ve gone back to check that I’ve completed all my tasks. One of the tasks for homework was to reflect and consider sharing my knowledge with a wider audience, so check it out, I've nailed this one right!

However, another task for (optional) homework was to reflect on how my understanding of the purpose of education is visible in my classroom. First of all yes you know you are a nerd when you feel the need to complete optional homework (which they call “reflect after” learning lol).

Well this is an interesting idea as I don't really have a classroom.  We work in an innovative learning environment (ILE) which I think might be the most recent acronym for open plan flexible learning spaces, there have been a few including MLE etc. I used to have a computer lab back in the day (just over 2 years ago) and quickly worked out that I’ll just go with a portable lab idea. When a class is about to start I simply burst out of a nearby cupboard with my nerd trolleys that store all the specialist gear needed like robots and laptops etc. So basically CLOWs (Computer Labs on Wheels) instead of just COWs. Each term I might be timetabled in another part of the school with no computers or gear which might freak out some digital teachers but that’s all good I just take over another cupboard. I guess we don’t really use the walls (not really that many of them either being open plan) much either as it always feels a bit temporarily and shared I never really feel like our class 'owns' it. So keeping my understanding of the purpose of education visible in my classroom is probably not so much about what is actually visible like things on walls in my classroom it is probably more invisible like the atmosphere of the class. This comes through in my communications, attitude and focus of learning and how I engage with the learners and this climate becomes my “classroom”. Oh man I hope some of that actually makes sense when you read it!  I really need to call it a day and go to bed.

So I just asked google how long a blog post should be and apparently top ranked blogs average about 2416 words for a blog post. I have not quite hit the mark yet but this is so close enough and I even added a picture so this should be some bonus points.  It took me way too long to write this, and I’m not sure if I can keep this up each week but anyway I’ll give it a go. But it could end up much like diets I’ve started on a Monday only to give up by Tuesday. It is awesome if you have read all of this so thanks very much for entertaining my ideas for this time (even if you did just skim read and jump to the bottom, I’ll forgive you). So the challenge is on. Will I write another one? Does anyone care or find this interesting? I guess time will tell. Have an awesome day and you can now get back to checking Facebook.

References

• Kelley, R. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66(6), 142–148.

• I would also like to take another look at some of Gert Biesta's ideas about education